Selected Quotes on Photography (and art)

"Yellow is the brightest of all colors, and does not even exist in a dark form"

Freeman, Michael - The Photographer's Eye

"As proposed by Goethe, red and green are equally bright, so combine 1:1, orange is twice as bright as blue and so their ideal combination is 1:2; while yellow and violet are at the extremes of the brightness scale, with ideal combined proportions of 1:3."

Freeman, Michael - The Photographer's Eye

"Brassaï was not his real name. Gyula Halász, the person who became Brassaï, may have been born in Brassó, Transylania, but he was adamant that 'the only birth date which matters to me is not Brassó 1899, but Paris 1933'"

Dyer, Geoff - The Ongoing Moment

"We, however, have learned to see ourselves for what we are, as the sun sees us. The Kodak bears witness. We see as the All-Seeing Eye sees, with the universal vision"

Dyer, Geoff - The Ongoing Moment

"People are photographed, they die. And then they come back and are photographed again, by someone else. It's a kind of reincarnation."

Dyer, Geoff - The Ongoing Moment

"The rocking chair is the throne of the Republic, symbol of leisure (wether achieved or inherited), of what John Berger, in another context, terms 'sedentary power'."

Dyer, Geoff - The Ongoing Moment

"Can you photograph an orange in black and white?"

Dyer, Geoff - The Ongoing Moment

"The technical decline of Winogrand's pictures was accelerated when, in 1982, he acquired an auto-wind which enabled him to take more photos with less and less thought as to what and how he was photographing"

Dyer, Geoff - The Ongoing Moment

"When one is walking about with a camera, one has almost the duty to be attentive"

Cortazar, Julio

"Conrad's view of fatalism: namely, that it is a species of fear - the fear that your fate is in your own hands, but that your hands are weak."

"Simply put, art that deals with ideas is more interesting than art that deals with technique"

"London Fields is a novel by Martin Amis about the London of the 1990s; whereas a snapshot of the Queen Mother is first and foremost about the Queen Mother and only secondarily by Cecil Beaton"

Dyer, Geoff - The Ongoing Moment

"Every drawing or painting that used perspective proposed to the spectator that he was the unique centre of the world. The camera - and more particularly the movie camera - demonstrated that there was no centre. "

Berger, John - Ways of Seeing

"Photography is not practiced by most people as an art. It is mainly a social rite, a defense against anxiety, and a tool of power."

Sontag, Susan - On Photography

"Time eventually positions most photographs, even the most amateurish, at the level of art."

Sontag, Susan - On Photography

"Marx reproached philosophy for only trying to understand the world rather than trying to change it. Photographers, operating within the terms of the Surrealist sensibility, suggest the vanity of even trying to understand the world and instead propose that we colect it."